Hairyducked Idiot

I'm like 60% sure I saw something about them practicing this week with Pryor at LG and Jenkins at RG, but I could be wrong.

It looks like Pryor will be LG and allow Jenkins to move back to his more natural position of RG. Maybe that helps? Please? Please can we have like two touchdowns?

https://x.com/BradBiggs/status/1837592729754161310 Edit: I screwed up the tweet embed but Brad Biggs is reporting Matt Pryor will start,

So digging into a bunch of Colts video, my opinion of this Bears team will drop considerably if they can't win this game. The Colts defense is just nothing special at every level. They don't have anything that disrupts the way the Titans and Texans do. If we can't put up a touchdown per half offensively against this, then we're a lot closer to looking at draft position in December than playoff standings. Anthony Richardson is going to make about 4-6 throws a game that there's just nothing you can do about, and he's going to spray a dozen nowhere near where they're supposed to go. We just have to do to him what the Packers always did to Fields and Trubisky: Sit back and make him play QB, let him lose it for them. The only good part of the Colts is their offensive line, so all those "da trenches" fans get to see their prototype on display.

Yeah, I don't think he's not trying. This is just what a 32-year-old WR with a history of lower body issues looks like. And next year he'll be a 33-year-old WR with a longer history of lower-body issues. I'm sure there's a price at which I would bring him back next year, but it's not something I'd be counting on or making a big investment in.

Then let's zag when everyone else is zigging.

I mean i would rather abandoned the run entirely and throw 75 times

Horner to IR. Presumably that makes vjj active. I wouldn't mind some reshuffling of RB to move Swift down. He's not The Reason the running game is struggling, but he's a little too timid hitting muddy but workable inside holes on zone read and hoping a home run lane outside is open, and that's just not realistic with how our OL has looked. We could minimize the suffering with a guy willing to bang through those interior holes for a couple yards at a time.

Keenan Allen already ruled out for this game (as are Blasingame, Horner and Pickens). You get what you get with 30+ year old WRs with lower body issues, at least we only paid a fourth and didn't extend him.

This guy is a slow, stumbling talker, you need to watch this at 1.5x speed to make it palatable. But I thought it was a good look at some of our bad run plays.

The new OC is the stupidest ever and if he just did these obvious things that fans can see, we'd be better. Just like the last guy. And the guy before that. And the guy before that. And ... (however long it takes to get to Shoop, who actually probably was the worst OC ever).

That's certainly a fascinating piece of fan fiction

So he got most of his targets in crunch time when the game was on the line? Damn they're really running him out of town It's pretty close to make believe.

Kmet started, played more than 2/3rds of snaps, and was tied for second on the team in targets and catches

Agreed. And E) we aren't punishing blitzes with well-executed screen passes. A lot of that is on Williams, who has tanked screen plays with double-clutches several times, a bad pass twice, and a dropped snap once. You could look at this stuff as "fire everyone, if mistakes are being made that means the coaches didn't coach well enough" and I won't argue with that. But I'm optimistically leaning toward "these are fixable execution errors not skill gaps, we could get better fast" for now.

That number got misinterpreted on social media and spread around. The Texans got 36 pressures total, sometimes with more than one coming on the same play. It wasn't pressure on 36 of 37 pass plays. Williams was pressured a below-average amount of time against the Titans, but people focused on a few bad pressure plays because it's way more fun to blame the pass protection than your rookie QB, people will always tend toward excuse-making for popular qbs. Williams wasn't pressured a lot early vs. the Texans. You could argue it's because he was getting the ball out so quickly and not because of protection actually winning. Then he was pressured a ton late, partially because the Bears proved they couldn't handle blitzing and partially because it was a "must-pass" situation and the Texans DL was able to sell out for pass rush

Everett only played 25 snaps on Sunday

1000% agree Although I'd love to see them clean up the mistakes in pass protection, I think overall it's been somewhere in the vicinity of adequate. The quickest way to solve it is stop putting themselves in difficult situations. Facing 3rd and Xteen while trailing in the fourth quarter against a good pass rush is playing the game on super extra hard mode. If they could clean up the false starts, the -3 runs because people are running the wrong play, etc., that would solve a lot of the issues

The narrative is forming that Williams has been running for his life every single play, but he's been middle of the pack in being given clean pockets

I'll admit that the last game shook my faith in that maxim. I think that they could have won despite a horrific run game if Williams had been a better qb. He didn't need to be perfect, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect a qb to hit a couple more of those intermediate-deep throws and a couple of the wide open hot routes on blitzes. If he does that, he throws for 250+ and they win despite everything else falling apart, because that's how important qb is. But since he's probably not going to turn into a veteran qb overnight, they can't afford to keep being*that* bad at running the football. You can't repeatedly throw downs away going backwards like that. They need to either upgrade the run game from "terrible" to "regular bad" in the near future or they need to abandon it entirely and throw 60 times a game. I still don't care about being good at running the ball and have no interest in investing resources into it

A few interesting play breakdowns of Williams taking over blitz calls. The missed execution on blitz pickup is *killing* us. The backs and tight ends are being aboslutely brutal at knowing their assignments and executing them. Williams has to start recognizing where the blitz is coming from and throwing to the hot on that side of the field. There's one where they bring two blitzers from the left and he has to intuitively know that the swing left is unbelievably open, but he's intent on throwing right the whole way. He throws it away and doesn't take a sack, which is nice, but if you start hitting those kinds of passes teams will stop blitzing you so much.

This is a big temperature check for me. I at most have one eyebrow very slightly raised in concern right now, but if they can't move the ball and score on this Colts defense, then I'll at the very least go all the way to one full eyebrow raised in concern. This is the beginning of a very soft stretch of the schedule and they absolutely need to bank wins before getting into November. I'm really surprised that the Bears are underdogs, even on the road, but I guess I'm drinking the kool-aid on this team a bit. The offense isn't as good as I hoped to see, but the defense has been on the high side of my hopes. Dexter's emergence as a legit DT has helped a ton. Colts have been absolutely run over their first two games and are now losing their best defensive lineman, so if the Bears can't get a functional running game going then it's gonna be a loooong season. No matter what happens, it's a looooong season and people need to let it breathe. In 2022, the Bears started 2-1 and the bears fandom on social media was convinced that it proved we had a playoff roster that had been sunk by Nagy and now Eberflus' culture was going to lead us there. They went 1-12 the rest of the way. In 2023, we started 0-3 with three ugly losses, none particularly close, and it felt like they might never win again. They went 7-7 from there on out.

He got sucked into one of those stupid "is X a No. 1" debates where it depends on how you define No. 1, and all the Bears fans in his comments yelled at in, so now he's half dug in and half baiting it for engagement.

I haven't watched it but i saw some reddit or summarize it Basically everything bad. Complaints about play design, blocking, Williams not utilizing hot routes and missing some open receivers, lots of snark towards DJ Moore

Indianopolis' best defensive lineman just went on IR. I'm not currently wildly concerned, but my concern levels will go up to one full raised eyebrow if the offense continues to sputter this badly against a much worse defense than we've played so far. People expect the rest of the season to look like early games too much. Two years ago, the Bears started 2-1 then almost ran the table with losses. Last year, they started out 0-3 with three bad losses, then were pretty average the rest of the way.